Addenda

Tomorrow, we leave Shanghai for Hanoi, Vietnam. There will be a post soon about our time in Xi'an and Shanghai. Meanwhile, these further thoughts/shamelss plugs related to recent posts:

1. Can't get enough appetizing mental images of me chewing on doggy stew in Seoul? Read our friend April's take on the evening. Her blog is really great, and she goes into even more yummy details...

http://aprilchristeen.blogspot.com/2008/10/boshintang.html

2. If you have not done so, check out our other blog. Flat Shunshi is a paper-thin Japanese boy who is accompying us on our travels (he is the Asian cousin of Flat Stanley, whom you may or may not have heard of). He is a school project for our seven-year-old nephew Josiah, and he has his own blog...

http://flatshunshi.travellerspoint.com

3. We are currently staying in Shanghai with a young man named Tiger (no, not that Tiger, though in his Couchsurfing profile pic he is wearing a red shirt). We spent some time talking tonight and conversation took a political turn. He had this to say about the attitudes of Chinese young people...

(paraphrasing)

"Most Chinese people are not really that interested in democracy. The government is opening up things so that they can make a lot of money and buy a nice home and a car, and that's more important to them so they want the government to keep doing what it's doing. They want the government to be more open and truthful with them, and they would like more freedom, but right now things are going well so they don't mind the status quo.

"I think that there will be democracy in China, maybe in five or ten years. But most of the people my age that I know are actually a little scared of democracy because we have never known anything but this. And we saw what happened in Taiwan when they went democratic, and there was a lot of corruption."